The Kicker

Just wanted to clarify.

Let’s start the day with a bit of levity: The Daily Show ribs cable news’ slightly self-aggrandizing self-promotional nicknames for themselves with an inside look into TDS’s own “Best Campaign Team in the Universe, Ever.” Bonus: In the next clip, watch BriWi tell Stewart, “If there’s a can of whoop-ass out here, I open it, […]

The splash made by The Washington Post’s much-discussed rehash of the Chandra Levy murder case rippled far beyond the thirteen days of the series’ publication, though perhaps not in the way WaPo executive editor Leonard Downie might have hoped. Bloggers and ombudspersons alike generally concluded that the series, though gripping, really wasn’t worth all the […]

Among the things members of the Phoneix Country Club are forbidden to do: 1) Use foul language or wear capri pants on the tennis courts. 2) Be a woman and be in the Grill Room. 3) Speak ill of The Club to the media (yes, Winthrop, that includes questioniong Rule 2). OK, so I’m just […]

A group of newspapers in Ohio (a Battleground State, you recall) is rating campaign ads on a scale* of 0 to 10 (0 being “misleading” and 10 “truthful”). These papers (The Plain Dealer ” in cooperation with” The Canton Repository, The Cincinnati Enquirer, The Columbus Dispatch and Dayton Daily News) give McCain’s “Celeb” ad (in […]

The Presidential Campaign as Experienced on Cable News over the past 24 hours (though it’s not just cable and it’s not just these 24 hours or even this election) is reminding me of this fifth grade schoolyard shouting match: You’re fat! You’re ugly – and I can diet! You’re stupid – and I can get […]

First it was a report of a woman’s eye maimed by her own faulty thong. Then it was the story of an injured mountain climber using her bra to, ahem, rouse help. Today, we have two additional instances of stories dubbed “News You Can’t Use” by MSNBC early in the morning (on Morning Joe) then […]

First, the Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank catches one of the guys running for president Acting Presidential again. “Barack Obama has long been his party’s presumptive nominee. Now he’s becoming its presumptuous nominee,” writes Milbank today. (See Todd Gitlin for one interpretation of this “‘presumptuous’ meme…swooping virally through the media.”) What will the “presumptuous-meme” peddlers* make […]

As Obama’s World Tour wound down, Maureen Dowd was on hand to observe (and then to share with us in her column today) that the candidate and the campaign “weren’t as wary with the press.” Indeed: The senator left his briefing books behind for a rare instance of mingling with his journalism posse at a […]

In a piece about how John McCain has and should handle his status as onetime campaign press “it” candidate running against the media’s current crush (move on, seems to be the consensus from pundits from the left and right), MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough tells The New York Observer: “The last thing you want as a politician […]

I was just watching a female reporter on MSNBC reporting about about the earthquake that has apparently just struck the Los Angeles area. Suddenly, she was interrupted by that Serious Breaking News From NBC music and there was Brian Williams — from London, on his way back from reporting in Tehran the Obama World Tour […]

Someone’s still willing to pay for (or, at least willing to lend a platform for) “advice” from Mark J. Penn. In Politico, in a piece headlined, “‘Active grannies’ the new socer moms,” Penn writes: With 18 percent of seniors undecided and polls very close in the battleground states, my advice would be to take a […]

Facebook’s Scrabble-like application pulled, journalists go back to work

You know that classic, climactic moment in movies, when someone gives a controversial-yet-rousing speech, and the audience, silent at first, slowly begins clapping? And the clapping builds and builds, until suddenly the speaker is bathed in thunderous applause? I ask because I, myself, had a Slow Clap Moment (well, a mental one, as an audience […]